Playing Climate-Change Telephone

Last week, Craig Rucker, a climate-change skeptic and the executive director of a nonprofit organization called the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), tweeted a quotation supposedly taken from a 1922 edition of the Washington Post: “Within a few years it is predicted due to ice melt the sea will rise & make most coastal cities uninhabitable.” The intent, of course, was to poke fun at current headlines about climate change.

Rucker’s organization is a member of the Cooler Heads Coalition, an umbrella organization operated by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit that prides itself on its opposition to environmentalists. Rucker himself is part of a network of bloggers, op-ed writers, and policy-shop executives who argue that climate change is either a hoax or an example of left-wing hysteria. Surfacing old newspaper clips is one of their favorite games. They also make substantive arguments about climate policy, but the sniping may be more effective. There is no stronger rhetorical tool than ridicule.

In this case, Rucker’s ridicule seems misplaced. After spending a few minutes poking around online, I was able to find both the Washington Post article and the longer source material that it came from—a weather report issued by the U.S. consul in Bergen, Norway, and sent to the State Department on October 10, 1922. The report didn’t say anything about coasts being inundated. This isn’t surprising. Scientists were smart back then, too, and they knew that melting sea ice wouldn’t appreciably raise sea levels, any more than a melting ice cube raises the level of water in a glass.

Rucker ultimately corrected his tweet once commenters pointed out the misquote. Through Twitter, he informed me that he had taken the line from a Washington Times op-ed by Richard Rahn, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. When I contacted Rahn’s office, a press representative acknowledged that Rahn had copied the quote from other bloggers and columnists; the fabricated sentence appears in articles at reason.com and texasgopvote.com. The fabricated line seems to have been inserted around 2011, but the original article has been circulating online since 2007. That was when a separate Washington Times article told of a man named John Lockwood who unearthed the Post article while doing research in the Library of Congress.

The statement about rising sea levels aside, 1922 really was a strange period in the Svalbard archipelago, the area described by the weather report. The islands lie halfway between Norway and the North Pole, at a latitude that puts them several hundred miles farther north than Barrow, Alaska. “The Arctic seems to be warming up,” the report read. In August of that year, a geologist near the island of Spitsbergen sailed as far north as eighty-one degrees, twenty-nine minutes in ice-free water. This was highly unusual. The previous several summers had likewise been warm. Seal populations had moved farther north, and formerly unseen stretches of coast were now accessible.

What are we to take from this historical evidence? A central tenet for Rucker and his colleagues is that today’s sea-ice retreat, warming surface temperatures, and similar observations are short-lived anomalies of a kind that often happened in the past—and that overzealous scientists and gullible media are quick to drum up crises where none exist. Favorite examples include numerous newspaper articles from the nineteen-seventies that predicted the advent of a new ice age. In fact, it’s possible to find articles from nearly every decade of the past century that seem to imply information about the climate that turned out to be premature or wrong.

The 1922 article has been quoted repeatedly by Rucker’s comrades-in-arms since its 2007 rebirth in the Washington Times. For nearly that long, scientists have been objecting. Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller and the deputy director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, points out that what was an anomaly in 1922 is now the norm: the waters near Spitsbergen are clear of ice at the end of every summer. More important, long-term temperature and sea-ice records indicate that the dramatic sea-ice retreat in the early nineteen-twenties was short-lived. It also occurred locally around Svalbard—the unusual conditions didn’t even encompass the whole Norwegian Sea, let alone the rest of the Arctic.

Over the weekend, after retracting his previous tweet, Rucker posted a link to a blog item about a different article, this one a 1932 New York Times story. The eighty-year-old headline reads, “The Next Great Deluge Forecast By Science: Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of the Seas and Flood the Continents.” That one sounded juicy, and, indeed, this time the text was correct: that really is what the headline said. Ironically, the lead researcher cited in the piece was a German scientist named Alfred Wegener, who has sometimes been considered a hero of climate-change deniers for a completely different reason. Wegener is known for proposing the phenomenon of continental drift starting around the First World War. The idea was ridiculed before gaining acceptance in the nineteen-sixties, once ample evidence had been amassed. Wegener’s life story, then, is used to support the idea that the small number of researchers in the field who downplay the risk of anthropogenic climate change will one day prevail.

In reality, the potential for anthropogenic global warming was being discussed earlier than continental drift, and took even longer to gain wide acceptance. The versatile Professor Wegener was a geophysicist and polar researcher who spent much of his career studying meteorology in Greenland, and trying to unlock the secrets of the Earth’s past. His elevated place in the current climate-change debate is abstracted from history.

In any case, it’s not clear that the bloggers linking to the 1932 article read much beyond the headline. The article does discuss a collapse of the ice sheets that would raise sea levels by more than a hundred feet—but it says that event lies thirty to forty thousand years in the future. There’s nothing wrong with examining old newspaper articles for clues about climate conditions in the past. Legitimate climate researchers look at historical documents of all kinds. However, a good-faith effort to arrive at the truth would not rely on cherry-picking catchy headlines. It would require considering the context and looking at all the evidence. At the very least, it wouldn’t allow for deliberate distortions. A prediction that the ice caps might melt by the year 42000 is hardly an example of climate alarmism.

Photograph of an island in Svalbard, Norway, by the Asahi Shimbun/Getty.